Jake10

General Lushan was brilliant and had the support of his troops as well as officials he captured, yet his rebellion failed, leading to the fall of the Tang Dynasty. Why?

mingming

He was murdered by his son who was murdered by his general who was in turn murdered by his son. By then most of An Lushan's subordinates knew it was over and began defecting to the Tang. The Tang also got their act together and pulled Muslim troops from the Western Regions to reinforce their armies.

Jake10

Hmm, sounds like a political mess. Now, according to what I read, Lushan weakened the Tang to the point that the dynasty became vulnerable and collapsed. Do you agree with that?

mingming

Well the rebellion did lead to the weakening of the centralized bureaucracy and the Tang did lose the Western Regions. The rebellion certainly was a major contributing factor to the eventual fall of the dynasty 150 years later.

RollingWave

An Lu Shang set a bad precedent to begin with, the Tang had military officers at the border areas that had much more free reign than usual to improve their effectiveness, but they were supposed to be balanced by limiting the region and men they controlled, however this rule was broken for An Lu Shang, who was given control of 3 such region instead of 1.

The Tang was out of option after the fled Chang An, so they essentially gave free reign to all the remaining general / governor to do whatever it takes to raise troops and fight the rebellion, essentially opening the door to warlordism much like the Han dynasty after the Yellow Turban Rebellion. Though the Tang was luckier in the sense that the most powerful of these first batch of warlord was Guo Zi Yi and not a Dong Zho / Tsao Tsao type. Guo had little political ambition so he managed to restore some semblance of power to the Monoachy and kepted it afloat.

After that the Tang lost control of many border regions that remained in the hands of various warlords, who were often in open rebellion, to counter that they set up even more warlords which was obviously a vicious cycle.

Jake10

so, basically, Lushan took advantage of the trust given to him and became the Tang's nemesis. They sacrificed their power to stop him, but that led to their demise. I would think that he would be badly remembered?

purakjelia

You should keep in mind that An Lushan was not Han Chinese. Ancient Chinese records suggested that his father was a Sogdian, while his mother was a Gokturk witch.

He gained the trust of the emperor Xuanzong. Before he rebelled, he was the supreme commander of the Tang armies of Fanyang, Pinglu, and Hedong (笵陽,平卢,河東三鎮節度使). I'm not sure whether it's correct or not to translate the word "節度使" as "supreme commander". An Lushan had an army of around 200000 soldiers, which was more than a third of all the Tang Dynasty's troops at that time.

Jake10

I don't know a whole lot about the Gokturks, but I have come across the word witch as having a couple of different meanings among the Asian tribes. I've seen this to indicate a healer sometimes, while at other times it refers to a person who used herbal potions combined with psychology to take control of people. How did the Gokturks use the word?

RollingWave

Which is why the following dynasty made a point to make sure their general's power are as limited as possible.... though that gave the opposite problem, they have a lot of trouble fighting off their foreign enemies.

mingming

That was part of the reason. The other part was the way Zhao Kuangyin became Emperor. His generals basically made him take the throne and he was afraid because they can do it again.